The Matzo Ball Heiress

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

  I highly doubt that the surviving Maysles brother, a godfather of cinema verité, would jump to narrate a film by a seventeen-year-old pothead. “That’s an interesting concept,” I manage to say.

  “Isn’t it though?” he says with a self-satisfied nod. “My dad says my grandfather knows him. He helped him get the film about Dylan made.”

  “Maybe you mean the one about The Rolling Stones. Don’t Look Back was the Dylan one. D.A. Pennebaker directed that.”

  “I’m sure Dad said it was Dylan.”

  I sneak an exasperated look at Vondra. “Do you want to learn mail merge? I’m the high priestess of Word around here. Although Vondra’s got me converting to the church of Excel.”

  During the next hour or so, getting Roswell to merge or file anything right is about as easy as terraforming Mars.

  Roswell eats from a large plastic bag full of cherry plums he produced from a bicycle-messenger bag graffitied with his versions of hardcore and punk–band logos. After each plum, he spits the pit into our wastebasket.

  I gather what’s needed for a just slightly more exciting task: the latest trade magazines, rubber glue and scissors for our clip book. “Cut and paste down any clips that mention our films or our film subjects.” I plop it all down on the intern table.

  Roswell eyes the lot with disdain. “Uh, Vondra, could I make a quick phone call?”

  “I’m Heather. And of course you can if you keep it quick—”

  “I’m with ya.” He nods vehemently.

  It’s hard not to listen. The kid is particularly animated with his phone pal.

  “Dude, you’d do Ms. Lambert? No way! She’s full of surgery. She’s like Pruneface in Batman.”

  Another five minutes later, after a searing look from the real Vondra, Roswell hangs up and asks, “Could I ask you a huge favor, Heather?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Dude, this is so sad. The government thinks my best friend Abdullah’s a terrorist. He fits their profile.”

  “I doubt that if he’s in an American high school.”

  “Trust me. He lives with his aunt. His parents live in Saudi Arabia, but he’s such a math god that his parents wanted him to go to Stuyvesant because his cousin went to school there. He graduated in December, ’cause he’s such a brain. But now he’s in trouble because his visa ran out.”

  “So what’s the favor?”

  “You’ve got to write a letter pretending he’s interning for you a few months. He was going to go to the University of Riyadh but now he wants to apply to Duke and Columbia. If he gets in to either school, the student visa should hold him.”

  “Roswell, I don’t know Abdullah.” I sigh. I’m really missing last year’s intern. Darius was a razor-sharp, enthusiastic NYU film major with Rasta braids pulled straight up with a rubber band, so that his head at first glance looked like a pineapple.

  “Dude, he’s my friend. He’s not a terrorist. He dates Jews at Stuyvesant. Would a terrorist get a blow job from a chick named Dimple Goldstein?”

  “Dimple Goldstein?” says Vondra from her desk.

  I make a mental note to share this choice gossip with Jake.

  “That’s her name, dude. Her dad is some comedian with Comedy Central. No shit. Her brother is on the Ultimate Frisbee team with me. Flicker Goldstein.”

  “Roswell, why don’t you ask Vondra to write that letter? She’s the Stuyvesant alumna.” I laugh to myself as Vondra looks at me from her desk with a crinkled forehead.

  “But, dude, you’re the Jew here.”

  “Excuse me?” I gasp.

  “I think a letter from a Jew with an Emmy is going to carry more weight.”

  “I really don’t think it’s my place to write that letter. I’m sure his principal will help him out.”

  Roswell shakes his head and says, “I feel so bad for you.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not for me to say.”

  Call me an idiot, but I had to know what this punky plum chomper had to say about me. “No, it’s fine. I really want to hear this.”

  “Your bitterness. It’s your aura.”

  Yes, I asked for it, but that stung.

  Roswell’s on a roll now: “You must hate your life, right?”

  “Now, why would you say a thing like that?” Vondra asks as she crosses her well-toned arms.

  “I love my life, man. I have good friends, and my folks totally love me. I know your type. You’re just like my old girlfriend.”

  “Really? How’s that?” I’m quite rattled, but the filmmaker in me yearns for a camera in hand. This should be good.

  “Her coldness. Her father abandoned her when she was ten. Did your parents desert you or something?”

  I summon up a dignified and pious look.

  “Heather, don’t answer,” Vondra says. “That’s plenty enough, Roswell.”

  “I’m well adjusted because my parents are beyond cool. When I was a baby, they rushed me to hospital after I ate a sponge. There was nothing they could do. So they waited there nine hours until I shit it out. That’s, like, a legendary story in my family.”

  “You shit sponge?” I say shakily.

  “Could I talk to you in the hall?” Vondra says to me.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just a straight-talking guy. That’s what my friends like about me.”

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  Roswell removes a browned banana from his messenger bag. “Sure.”

  Vondra closes the door and motions me closer to the bathroom we share with other businesses on our floor. “Asshole! No one should talk to you like that.”

  “I did ask him. And he was spot on about my family. Let’s let him finish the morning out.”

  When Roswell takes his bathroom break, Vondra dials Jacinta at the City as School to demand a stop to this.

  “Busy,” she whispers. “I’ll try later.”

  Vondra calls Jacinta all morning and early afternoon to no avail. She passes me a note on a pink Post-it: Maybe her line is off the hook.

  At a quarter to three, Roswell springs erect, his shoulders braced as if he was reborn. “So, I’ll see you girls on Monday.”

  Before we can answer, he leaves for the day.

  “Unthinkable,” Vondra says as the phone rings. She answers and says Uh-huh a lot. When she hangs up, she hits me with troubling news: “Mark Lander just got a feature in Paris. We need a new DP to shoot the next Grand Ladies segment.”

  “That’s two days away.”

  “You’re telling me. I’ll call Tom to see if he could fill in.”

  “Tom? God, he’s such a perfectionist on a shoot. We’ll spend two hours setting up for fifteen minutes.”

  “Who else could we call?”

  “Let me see if I have someone’s number on me.” I fish out the Jared S. business card in the depths of my Kate Spade purse. I stare at it for a moment. Should I do this?

  “Who’s the someone?”

  “A cameraman I met during the Food Channel shoot. A guy named Jared.”

  “Can he do lights too? After the last shoot we have no budget for a gaffer and we’re screwed if the museum is too dark.”

  “I could just pay for the extra help.” Why hold back? She knows now that I’m loaded.

  “No. This is a fifty-fifty business. Let’s proceed as usual.”

  “Well, I think he knows lights. If I get him, I’ll ask. He seemed capable. My only worry is that he asked a question and told a joke while the producer was interviewing me—”

  “Well, tell him no questions. We’re the producers. It’s such a short shoot. I’m sure he’ll do. Can you call him now?”

  I’m having second thoughts. “On a Friday night?”

  “Yes. We need him Sunday morning.”

  I dial the number on his card. After four rings the answering machine picks up: This is Jared. I’m not able to come to the phone now, but if this is about work I’ll be able to get back to you after Saturday night.

  “
Hey, Jared. This is Heather Greenblotz from the matzo factory, although I’m calling with my documentary cap on now. Are you free for a shoot Sunday morning? Our regular cameraman got a big job in Paris. You can call our office…”

  “Machine?” Vondra says in a disappointed voice.

  “I don’t think he’ll get back to us until Saturday. His machine says he’s tied up.”

  “No pager?”

  I pout. “No.”

  “We’re up shit’s creek if we don’t find anyone.”

  “I can shoot,” I say.

  “If we want our film on a Heather diagonal.”

  “My eye isn’t that bad.”

  “Not if you’re filming a Van Gogh painting—”

  It takes a second to think of that famous picture of Van Gogh’s room on a slant. A delayed smile. “Good joke, bitch.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “At least I can shoot a camera,” I rally. “You just give orders.”

  This time Vondra laughs with her hand straight up in a Black Panther fist. With her other hand she flips through her Rolodex for other cameraman possibilities.

  “Let’s give it to Sunday morning,” Vondra says to me by phone on Saturday night. “If we have to cancel we have to cancel.”

  “Fine.”

  “How’re the seder plans going?”

  “Well, so far all I’ve got is my cousin Jake, of course, and my cousin Greg from Florida, but he’s a flake—”

  “How about your father?”

  “No luck. I might have to go to Amsterdam next weekend and look for him. My therapist thinks I should pretend he’s a documentary subject.”

  “I could have saved you a session. Remember at PBS how you got the Brooklyn-born oboist in the Mexico City Symphony Orchestra on the phone in five minutes?’

  “His name was Murray Bernstein. It wasn’t that hard to find him.”

  “You’ll track your father down if you get in the docu-zone.”

  “You think?”

  “You’ll have to pick up stroopwafels for me of course—”

  “What’s that? A clog?”

  “That’s the cookie that helped me gain ten pounds during my year abroad.”

  “Yeah and you were what, a size two then?” I stick my tongue out at her in disgust. “I forgot you went to school in Amsterdam.”

  “No, in Leiden. Where Rembrandt studied.”

  “So, tell me, world traveler, how long is the flight to Amsterdam?”

  “One hour more than London. Six hours. I love Amsterdam. I was there every weekend when I was in Leiden. Great Indonesian food.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  “What will really get you going is the shopping. There are cool specialty stores all over. I’m talking microspecialty, like a button store on Wolvenstraat you have to check out. I bought some silver ladybug buttons there I sewed on a summer shirt, and also some reindeer buttons for the Christmas sweater my sister was knitting for my niece.”

  “Sounds like it’s worth a look.”

  “And oh, there’s a store just for toothbrushes.”

  “Great, if I don’t get to my dad, I’ll bring home a designer toothbrush.”

  Vondra signs off from our America Online account and looks up.

  “Did I tell you I’m going to invite Mahmoud?”

  “Where?” I ask absentmindedly.

  “To the seder,” Vondra says.

  “To the seder?” She’s got my full attention now. “Um—”

  “Is that a problem? I thought you needed more people.”

  “Vondra. That’s not a great idea.”

  “Why? You’re worried that he’s Arabic, am I right? I told you, he’s very open-minded. He doesn’t hate Jews. He’s curious about them.”

  “Vondra. He’s Egyptian. You can’t have an Egyptian at a seder. From what I remember, the whole seder is about how God disses the Egyptians so the Jews can get out of their clutches.”

  “You’re nuts. It’s ancient history. I’m sure he’ll love it.”

  For a woman with incredible smarts—she knows the capital of every country and still remembers where the anus of a starfish is from her biology classes—Vondra can on the odd occasion be as naive as a fresh-off-the-bus Midwesterner smiling at a pimp in the Greyhound bus terminal.

  I quickly strategize. If Mahmoud were asked, and declined himself, I’d be spared any animosity. I have enough problems without having Vondra angry with me. Mahmoud’s a public figure. An Arab public figure to boot: official spokesman for the Egyptian consulate. With all the unrest in the Middle East, the last place he’ll want to be seen on TV is at an American seder. To the wrong people, an unseemly choice. He could get assassinated by, take your pick, a) some crazy schmuck from al-Qaeda; b) some crazy schmuck from the Jewish Defense League.

  I’m confident in my plan. “Okay, so why don’t you ask him?”

  Saturday night I’m alone on my couch watching ten-year-old cable repeats of America’s Funniest Home Videos. During a commercial break, I drop the contents of my cooked frozen dinner in the cutlery drawer, and extract everything I can out of the drawer, plucking the last penne pasta off a fork tine, and put the salvaged meal back in the microwave and then drop the tray again. I am so determined not to be on the losing end of a battle between a Lean Cuisine box and me that I replate my food off the floor with the floor-tile and culinary-drawer grime and crunch and crap mixed into the cream sauce and head back for the living room.

  The phone rings. I pull a wet piece of dust out of my mouth, and start without a pause: “No luck, Vondra. Haven’t heard from Jared. I called Mark Lander to see if he could send anyone our way before he left for France but his two-year-old was screaming like a banshee because she snuck a gob of wasabi out of his take-out sushi tray.”

  “It’s Jared, Heather.”

  “Oh, hi!” I lurch forward for the remote to mute the four nominees who have a shot for the grand prize $100,000 funniest video. Too late: “Kitty Pileup!” booms the announcer.

  “So tell me about the shoot. I have Sunday free.”

  “Terrific. I hear you do lighting, too.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Steve,” I say.

  “Yes. I was a gaffer for two years before I got into camera work. So, what are we filming?”

  “It’s an HBO documentary about sex.”

  “Let me chew on that for a minute,” Jared says dryly. “Uh, okay.”

  “Don’t get too excited. The woman who’s talking about sex is a grandmother of three.”

  “That still sounds more exciting than my typical Secrets of a Super Soufflé segment.”

  “Whatever gets you to say yes. I can’t believe you’re available. Damn, that’s great. From your message, I thought you might be away on a shoot this weekend.”

  “No, but I just had other plans Friday and earlier today.”

  “Well, the pay is okay considering it’s a tiny shoot. We should be there no longer than an hour, and it’s two hundred bucks for the segment.”

  “That’s pretty fair.”

  “We don’t have a Betacam, but we do have an XL–2.”

  “Bingo. That’s the one I use on my downtime.”

  “There’s a tiny scratch on the viewfinder but it doesn’t affect the picture.”

  “I’ll bring mine so you don’t have to bother getting it checked.”

  “You’re my hero, Jared.”

  “You have enough DV tapes?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Where should I meet you?”

  “We’ll meet you at the American Museum of Natural History in the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution, 9:30 a.m. The woman we have scheduled coined the term Elastic Marriage and there are a couple of threesomes in the caveman dioramas.”

  “Very clever.”

  “Vondra’s idea.”

  “How did you finagle the museum into letting you film? Steve wanted to use the Hall of Ocean Life for a fried-fish segment, but they told him
no way very emphatically.”

  “That section just reopened. Maybe they weren’t ready.”

  “He knew one of the women on the design team who was going to let him in for a preview. Dated her, I think.”

  That figures. “Really?” I ask as neutrally as possible.

  “All the same, her boss knocked the idea back.”

  “What can I say? I’m better on the phone than on the camera.” I’m pleased I outgunned Steve in one area. “They’re fine with it as long as we have the filming over by midmorning so it won’t interfere with the afternoon rush.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  The Hall of Human Biology and Evolution is on the ground floor of the American Museum of Natural History, just past the booth where volunteers give visitors the little metal admission buttons to stick on their shirts. Vondra wants to leave me with the equipment and the cavemen while she gets a sip of water from the fountain around the corner.

  “Why are your lips purple?” I ask.

  “Grape Pixie Stix. Mahmoud and I are giving up smoking, and I need something to get me through the day. They may not be good for your teeth but they’re very low in fat.”

  “You like him enough to quit smoking? That’s incredible.”

  “I like him enough to father my children. I’m on cloud nine.”

  I shake my head in amusement. “Go get your water.”

  Jared taps me on the shoulder, and I’m surprised by how happy I am to see him.

  “Thanks for stepping in,” I say. He’d be so, so cute if he just shaved that beard.

  “My pleasure.” Jared unzips his black nylon jacket. As he unhinges his hard camera case, Roswell arrives. We haven’t had the heart to fire him yet, and we can’t get perky Jacinta on the phone to do it for us.

  “Hey,” our would-be Scorsese says with a big yawn.

  “Roswell, this is Jared, our cameraman for the day.”

  “Hey,” Jared says.

  Roswell removes a tiny spiral notebook with Japanese Anime artwork on the cover from his military jacket. “That’s a cool-looking camera. What is it?”

  “Canon XL–2. Nifty little thing, much easier to maneuver than a Beta camera, which is what they use on the networks. But it’s broadcast quality.”